Archive for December, 2017

International branch campuses are facing questions about their sustainability. It’s a good point to ask their students about their perceptions of how they prepare them for the jobs market and to what extent they can tap the experience of teachers from the parent university.

The Danish government’s national languages strategy is much needed to address the plummeting take-up of languages. For universities a key task is to integrate language skills in foreign languages other than English into other courses and to develop local languages strategies with municipalities.

Danish universities need to do more to promote sectoral mobility of researchers, which fosters increased innovation, knowledge turnover, technological development and relevance for research and education, according to the findings of a major investigation by the Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy.

The draft global convention on academic mobility will improve the rights of internationally mobile students, promote robust ethical quality assurance systems, contribute to building trust across borders and pave the way for increased global cooperation in higher education.

The moves that led to Nokia’s decline paint a cautionary tale for successful firms.

In less than a decade, Nokia emerged from Finland to lead the mobile phone revolution. It rapidly grew to have one of the most recognisable and valuable brands in the world. At its height Nokia commanded a global market share in mobile phones of over 40 percent. While its journey to the top was swift, its decline was equally so, culminating in the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2013.

The AI boom holds both utopian and dystopian possibilities that we may not yet be prepared for.

Changes wrought by new technologies are often regarded with suspicion in their time. Yet market economies have consistently transformed techno-shocks into long-term advantages for a wide swathe of society. This was true with electricity, the advent of the conveyor belt and even the first wave of the IT revolution. In most advanced economies, for example, armies of office workers have shrunk as a casualty of the computer revolution that began in the late 1960s. In 2017, few would reject the benefits that have arisen from eliminating rote tasks, such as filing and tapping out letters on temperamental typewriters.

However, the next wave of tech breakthroughs – AI, big data, and digitalisation – appears different in nature. While previous innovations have replaced routine tasks, they could not replace human cognitive tasks. Humans were necessary and technology helped make them more productive. The new wave – let’s call it “robot technology” – is different. Intelligent computers are capable of replacing human activities on a much broader scale. And this can lead to widespread changes in employment.

British universities have been accused of threatening free speech on issues such as Palestine by insisting on tough yet ill-defined rules that events must be chaired by approved ‘independent’ moderators.

While the United States and United Kingdom have made decisions that raise uncertainty over international cooperation and free movement of students, China is pushing to become a global leader in higher education – but will it push ‘Chinese characteristics’?

As Duke University in the United States prepares to set up an undergraduate liberal arts degree at its campus in Kunshan, China, and with other proposals by foreign universities for such programmes in the offing, China’s motivations for setting up ‘experimental’ liberal arts degrees are coming under scrutiny.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the divide between higher education systems that increase public funding and those that reduce investment is getting wider in Europe, with recovery slow and fragile in many countries and with some still going backwards, a new report says.